I executed cvs update today (removing the sourceforge machines from .ssh/known_hosts worked fine for me, btw) followed by a configure and a make clean. The last step failed with this output: ... make[1]: Entering directory `/home/beluga/skip/src/python/dist/src/Modules' Makefile.pre.in:20: *** missing separator. Stop. make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/beluga/skip/src/python/dist/src/Modules' make: [clean] Error 2 (ignored) I found the following at line 20 of Modules/Makefile.pre.in: @SET_CXX@ I then tried a cvs annotate on that file but saw that line 20 had been there since rev 1.60 (16-Dec-99). I then checked the top-level Makefile.in thinking something must have changed in the clean target recently, but cvs annotate shows no recent changes there either: 1.1 (guido 24-Dec-93): clean: localclean 1.1 (guido 24-Dec-93): -for i in $(SUBDIRS); do \ 1.74 (guido 19-May-98): if test -d $$i; then \ 1.24 (guido 20-Jun-96): (echo making clean in subdirectory $$i; cd $$i; \ 1.4 (guido 01-Aug-94): if test -f Makefile; \ 1.4 (guido 01-Aug-94): then $(MAKE) clean; \ 1.4 (guido 01-Aug-94): else $(MAKE) -f Makefile.*in clean; \ 1.4 (guido 01-Aug-94): fi); \ 1.74 (guido 19-May-98): else true; fi; \ 1.1 (guido 24-Dec-93): done Make distclean succeeded so I tried the following: make distclean ./configure make clean but the last step still failed. Any idea why make clean is now failing (for me)? Can anyone else reproduce this problem? Skip